Ten years ago, when a couple looking to open a coffee shop asked around about setting up on Broad Street, the answer they kept getting was some version of "maybe in five years, but not now." The corner they wanted sat at the western edge of downtown, past the tourist maps, in a neighborhood locals call Five Points. It had a dry cleaner that closed, then sat empty behind plywood for years.
That couple opened Crema Brew anyway. Ten years later, the corner they were warned off of is the one New Bern residents actually treat as their weekend loop, not the postcard blocks along Front Street where the historic homes and the walking tours live.
If you already live here, you've felt this shift without necessarily naming it. This fall gives you a reason to name it, because the calendar makes the split obvious: the festivals are all happening downtown and at the waterfront, on their usual once-a-year schedule, while Five Points keeps running its own week-in, week-out rhythm three or four blocks away, tourist season or not.
The Blocks Nobody Wanted
Five Points sits west of New Bern's historic district, and its own history predates the coffee shop by more than a century. The neighborhood became home to Black-owned businesses forced out of downtown during the disenfranchisement era at the end of the 19th century, including the state's first Black-owned bank, which opened on Broad Street in 1898. For most of the 20th century and into the 2000s, that business corridor faded. By the time Crema Brew's owners were house-hunting for a storefront, longtime residents weren't wrong to warn them off. There wasn't much there.
What changed the math wasn't a plan from City Hall. It was a small run of individual bets, made within a few years of each other, by people who could afford Five Points precisely because nobody else wanted it.
Kurtis Stewart, who grew up nearby in Duffyfield, opened Broad Street Takeout as an investment in the corridor's revival rather than a chef's dream project. He's since become president of a community development group focused on the area's recovery. A few blocks over on Pollock Street, Pete Frey took a building with a caved-in roof and turned it into Brewery 99, a taproom and beer garden that now anchors the other end of the strip. Freshwater Beer Co. moved in nearby not long after, and for a stretch of time a third bar, Tap That, filled out what regulars started calling the Beermuda Triangle: three beer-focused spots within easy walking distance of each other, none of which existed in that corridor a decade ago.
What's Actually There Now
If you're mapping Five Points today, this is the short version of what sits within a few blocks of Broad and Pollock:
- Crema Brew (Broad Street): the coffee shop that started the turnaround, still busy enough on weekend mornings that regulars know to expect a short line.
- Broad Street Takeout: Stewart's investment in the corridor, built specifically to give the neighborhood a reason for foot traffic beyond coffee.
- Brewery 99 (Pollock Street): the taproom built out of a building that used to have a hole in its roof, now hosting bluegrass shows and a regular Bike MS training ride.
- Freshwater Beer Co.: the newer addition to the beer cluster, small-batch and family-friendly by design.
That's four businesses, none of them chains, all within a walk of each other, none of them there in anything like this form before the mid-2010s.
The Triangle Had a Bad Year
None of this happened in a straight line, and the honest version of the story includes a stumble. Tap That, the largest of the three original beer spots with room for 275 people inside and no cap on its outdoor space, announced in December 2023 that it was closing its doors, and ownership was upfront that the closure could be temporary or permanent. For a while, the Beermuda Triangle was down to two legs.
The doors came back open. Visitor check-ins at the same Pollock Street address continued into 2024, including comments specifically noting "the new Tap That," which points to a reopening rather than a quiet fade-out. If you're a Five Points regular, you likely already know how that chapter played out better than any outside writeup can tell you. The point for the rest of us is that even the neighborhood's newest anchor tenant survived a real closure scare and came back into the rotation.
What Runs Every Week Versus What Runs Once a Year
Here's the part that separates Five Points from the version of New Bern most visitors see. The city's marquee fall events are all clustered downtown or along the waterfront, and they happen once a year on fixed dates. Five Points runs on its own schedule that doesn't care what week of the festival calendar it is.
| Where | What | Frequency | This Fall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Five Points (Broad & Pollock) | Coffee, takeout, and the beer cluster | Every week, year-round | No special dates. It's just Tuesday. |
| Union Point Park | Movies in the Park | Monthly during the season | Finding Nemo on September 25 |
| Downtown / Craven Arts Council | ArtWalk | Monthly | September 14 |
| Riverfront Convention Center | BSH Oktoberfest Fundraiser | Annual | September 26, its 15th year |
| Historic downtown waterfront | MumFest | Annual | October 9-11, 46th year |
| Historic downtown & Cedar Grove Cemetery | Ghostwalk | Annual | October 22-24 |
MumFest alone pulled more than 75,000 attendees last year, according to organizer Swiss Bear Inc. That's a lot of closed streets and full parking lots concentrated into a single weekend along Front Street and the waterfront. Five Points, sitting a short walk to the west, doesn't get any of that traffic and doesn't need it. The neighborhood's version of a Saturday doesn't require a festival permit or a street closure. It requires Crema Brew being open at its usual hours and at least one of Five Points' breweries pouring by early afternoon.
For a resident deciding how to spend a fall weekend, that's the actual choice on the table. You can drive downtown for MumFest, park a few blocks out, and work your way through the crowd toward the beer garden and the vendor booths. Or you can walk to Broad Street, get a coffee, grab takeout, and end up at Brewery 99 or Freshwater Beer Co. without waiting for October or fighting for a parking spot.
Both are valid. But only one of them happens on a Tuesday in February too.
The Map Worth Carrying Into October
None of this is a case that Five Points is "better" than downtown New Bern. The historic district earns its reputation and this fall's calendar proves it, from the Tryon Palace gardens opening free during MumFest weekend to the New Bern Historical Society's Ghostwalk winding through Cedar Grove Cemetery in late October. Those are real, well-run events worth showing up for.
The case is narrower and more useful than that. If you already live here, the neighborhood that quietly earns your regular business, the one that doesn't ask you to check an events calendar first, sits a few blocks west of the tourist map. It got there because a handful of people bet on a corner nobody else wanted, one coffee shop and one caved-in roof at a time, and the bet held even when one of the anchors briefly went dark.
That's worth knowing whether you're heading out this weekend or just trying to understand why your own Saturday routine has quietly shifted west over the past few years.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this means for your own plans in New Bern, Turn-Key Realty has spent years tracking how corridors like Five Points change block by block, and we're glad to talk through what that means for you.
